Chapter 20
Anne
“We’ll work it into a scene in the bedroom,” Master Paul said, his voice still pitched low, still for my ears only.
“Before the shaving. A girl who disobeyed her suitor’s instructions needs to confess.
Then baring her can be part of her training for the marriage bed.
It might give the whole sequence an even better emotional arc that—”
“Paul. Anne.” Melissa’s voice cut across the studio, and I flinched, stepping back from Master Paul with the guilty reflexes of a girl caught in a forbidden embrace.
Melissa strode toward us with her characteristic long-legged purpose, her tablet tucked under one arm and her coffee in the opposite hand.
She had pulled her dark hair back severely.
She had the focused energy I was beginning to recognize as her default state.
“Darlene’s ready on the bathroom set,” Melissa said, reaching us and glancing between Master Paul and me with eyes that missed nothing.
“I think we need to shoot on the bedroom set first,” Master Paul said.
His voice had shifted seamlessly from the intimate, low register he’d used with me to the professional authority he wielded with the production team.
“Before we get to the shaving. There’s a scene we need to shoot—Anne and I discussed it just now.
A confession scene. It’ll set up the emotional context for the bathroom. ”
Melissa’s eyebrows rose. Her gaze flicked to me—taking in, I was certain, the violent flush on my face, the brightness in my eyes, the way my hands had found each other in front of my skirt and were holding on for dear life—and then back to Master Paul.
Something passed between them, a silent communication that I couldn’t fully decode, but that seemed to carry the weight of professional shorthand developed over years of collaboration.
“A confession scene,” Melissa repeated. Her lips curved. “About what, exactly?”
“Anne broke a rule,” Master Paul said. Simply. Factually. As if he were reporting a weather condition.
The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet. Hearing him say it aloud, in front of Melissa, in the open space of the studio where anyone could hear, sent a wave of mortification through me so intense that I actually swayed. My hands tightened against each other.
Melissa’s eyes widened fractionally. Then they narrowed, and the smile that spread across her face was the smile of a woman who had just been handed exactly what she wanted.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s perfect. That’s—yes.
Absolutely yes. Let me get Darlene.” She turned and called across the studio, her voice carrying with the practiced projection of someone accustomed to being heard.
“Darlene! Change of plan. We’re going to shoot on the bedroom set first. Is it still up from yesterday? ”
Darlene emerged from behind a partition at the far end of the studio, her silver-cropped head appearing first, followed by the rest of her wiry, black-clad frame. She had a light meter in one hand and an expression of mild irritation on her face.
“I’ve been in the bathroom for two hours calibrating the tile reflections,” Darlene said flatly. “What do you mean, bedroom first?”
“Paul wants to shoot a confession scene before the shaving,” Melissa said, already moving toward the monitor bank, her fingers flying across her tablet. “Something came up. It’s going to be incredible—trust me.”
Darlene’s pale eyes moved from Melissa to Master Paul to me, and I watched her perform the same rapid, clinical assessment that everyone in this studio seemed capable of—reading my flushed face, my rigid posture, the way I couldn’t quite stand still.
Whatever she saw made her expression shift from irritation to something more calculating.
“The bedroom’s still set up,” she said. She looked at Master Paul. “What’s the blocking? Same bed position as yesterday, or something different?”
“Different,” Master Paul said. He put his hand on the small of my back—a light, proprietary touch that sent electricity racing up my spine—and guided me toward the bedroom set. “Anne’s going to be standing. Facing me. She has something to tell me, and I want her on her feet when she says it.”
Darlene nodded once, already moving toward the lighting rigs. “Five minutes,” she repeated over her shoulder. “Melissa, I want the B-camera on a low angle. If she’s standing and he’s in the chair, I want to shoot up at her face during the confession. The vulnerability reads better from below.”
“Let’s talk wardrobe,” Melissa said.
Master Paul nodded. “I think I’ve just gotten back from a business trip. So, a suit for me.”
My jaw slackened and my eyes went wide as I understood just how good at this he was. Then he glanced at me, and my face blazed anew at the look of assessment in his eyes.
“For Anne… hmm… something I won’t like.”
Melissa cut in, nodding along with him. “New Modesty training bra and panties, under jeans and a tee. She’s retreating… defending… because she knows she’s going to be in trouble. You’ll be displeased. Perfect.”
I looked from her to Master Paul, my stomach dropping. This had been my idea, but the realization of it… I swallowed hard as I thought about the training panties I’d seen in meetings with Penelope.
“Um,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“I… can we… I mean… can I wear, you know, like regular underwear, with a dress, maybe?”
A tiny smile played on Master Paul’s mouth, but his eyes narrowed. He shook his head.
“Don’t make this harder for yourself, Annie,” he said, with a note of firmness in his voice that made my heart quail. “You’ll wear what I decide you should wear, or you’ll be in more trouble than you are already.”
The words landed hard. I almost let out a whimper. They felt like a hand—like my master’s hand—pressing down on my shoulder, urging me to my knees in front of him. That pressure seemed to grow heavier and more real with every hour I spent in this man’s orbit.
You’ll wear what I decide you should wear.
Not a suggestion. Not a negotiation. A statement of fact delivered with the same quiet certainty he’d used when he’d told me my mouth was a cunt in my face, when he’d told me to open my throat and take him deeper, when he’d told Penelope I wasn’t allowed to come.
And just like every other time Master Paul had drawn a line around me and told me to stay inside it, my body responded before my mind could mount a defense. The heat bloomed between my legs and my stomach did a slow, sickening somersault that left me dizzy.
I stood there before him, caught.
Caught… not just in the obvious sense that he had caught me disobeying, caught me touching myself, caught me with my face on fire while two people discussed what underwear I’d be wearing when I confessed to masturbating.
Caught in something larger. Something structural that had started to close around me the moment I’d walked into Penelope’s office for my first day at Selecta.
It had tightened with every subsequent event until I could feel it pressing against me on all sides like the walls of a slowly shrinking room.
I seemed to be trapped between two versions of my life, and I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
In the fiction, the narrative arc that Melissa was constructing for Her Secret Garden’s subscribers, I was a young bride-to-be whose suitor had caught her touching herself while he was away on business.
He would scold me. He would punish me. He would shave my most intimate place to remind me who it belonged to.
It represented a story. A scene. Something that existed within the bounded frame of Darlene’s cameras.
But the girl who had come five times last night while fantasizing about being belt-whipped wasn’t fictional.
The wetness currently soaking through my underwear wasn’t scripted.
The way my heart slammed against my ribs when Master Paul said you’ll wear what I decide—that wasn’t acting.
That was Anne Chamberlain, twenty years old, standing in front of a man who had taken possession of her body and her obedience with a speed and a thoroughness that should have terrified her, and it did terrify her, it terrified me; the fear was real and present and lived in my chest like a trapped bird.
It was also the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.
The realization arrived without fanfare.
It didn’t crash over me the way the orgasms had last night, violent and obliterating.
It settled quietly like snow. One moment I stood in the studio feeling the familiar tangle of shame and arousal and confusion, and the next moment I understood something about myself with a clarity that made the lights seem to get brighter.
I was falling in love with him.
Him, not his character as suitor or as trainer.
Paul Mason. The man who had wiped a tear from my cheek with his thumb and told me my body needed time to process.
The man who had heard me ask, shaking and terrified, if we could turn my disobedience into a scene, and had looked at me with an appreciation so warm it had cracked something open in me.
I was falling in love with a man who called my private part a cunt and made me suck his cock on camera and had forbidden me from touching myself. Soon he would dress me in humiliating training underwear—so he could undress me again when I confessed to disobeying him.
I was falling in love with my master.
“Amy!” Melissa called across the studio, and I flinched, dragged back to the surface of the present moment. “Amy, can you take Anne to wardrobe? Training set—NM basics. White. And jeans and a tee from the casual rack.”
Amy appeared, in the black crew polo that all the production assistants wore. She had a small clipboard that she held against her chest like a shield.
“Morning,” she said, smiling at me with an easy warmth that felt, in the context of everything else happening, almost surreal. “Come with me?”
I followed her. My legs moved mechanically, carrying me across the studio floor toward the changing area, which was separated from the main space by a series of heavy black curtains.
Amy held one aside for me and I ducked through, entering a smaller space lined with rolling racks of clothing.
There was a full-length mirror and a small vanity table scattered with makeup brushes.
“Okay,” Amy said, looking at her clipboard.
“So Melissa wants you in the New Modesty training basics. White set. I’ve got your size from yesterday’s fitting notes.
” She moved to one of the racks and pulled out a clear plastic bag containing folded white fabric.
“Jeans are here.” She gestured to a shelf.
“And tees are on the end rack. Grab whatever fits. I’ll help you if you need it. ”
She set the plastic bag on the vanity table and unzipped it, and I looked down at the contents, garments that were all-too-familiar from my meetings with Penelope.
White stretch cotton. Simple. Almost aggressively plain.
A halter bra and boy-short panties that looked like they could have come from any department store’s basics section.
I knew better, though: I knew that even without the sensors and vibration modules that featured in the Awareness line, Penelope’s NM integration team had sized and tailored the basics line to feel constricting.
To make the wearer feel that her intimate areas were, well, in training.
Clean, white, functional underwear that looked like something a girl’s mother might buy her but carried a suitor’s grownup demands.
“I’ll just…” I gestured vaguely at the curtain, meaning turn around, meaning give me privacy, meaning please don’t watch me undress because I am currently so aroused that the evidence of it has probably soaked through to my skirt and I will die, I will literally die, if another person sees it.
“Oh, sure,” Amy said, and turned her back, busying herself with something on the rack.
I unbuttoned my pink blouse with fingers that shook. I unzipped my skirt and let it fall. I stood in my underwear—the same polka dots, freshly laundered, that seemed to have become the unofficial uniform of my humiliation—and I reached for the waistband of the panties.
The moment I pulled them down, I knew Amy would know.
The gusset was soaked. Not damp. Not merely moist. Soaked—a dark, obvious stain that had spread well beyond the center panel and into the fabric on either side.
The evidence of my arousal was so copious, so undeniable, that the cotton clung to my folds as I peeled the panties away, and a thin, glistening strand connected the fabric to my body for an obscene moment before it broke.
I bunched the panties in my fist and shoved them beneath my skirt on the chair. My face was burning. My whole body was burning. I reached for the training panties with desperate speed, wanting to cover myself before—
“Oh… here, let me help you with the—”
Amy had turned around.
Her eyes dropped reflexively, the way anyone’s eyes drop when movement catches their peripheral vision.
I watched her gaze land down below my tummy.
On the glistening evidence of what my body had been doing since approximately 5:47 that morning when I’d woken from a dream about Master Paul’s belt.
On my inner thighs, shining with a slickness I hadn’t been able to wipe away.